Native Lands - Native Scholars: Challenges in Higher Education

Indigenous people worldwide inhabit places with the highest remaining biodiversity on the planet (Durning, 1992) and are primary stewards of these lands, thereby actively conserving biodiversity throughout the world (Weber et al., 2000). The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe (CSKT) located on the Flathead Indian Reservation, home to the Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’ Oreille and Kootenai People, is no exception. The Flathead Reservation spans 1.317 million acres in northwest Montana on the western slope of the Continental Divide. The eastern border of the reservation is comprised of the Mission Mountain Tribal Wilderness Area and Jocko Primitive Area of the Rocky Mountains Mountain. To the north are the Cabinet Mountain Range, Lozeau Primitive Area and Flathead Lake; the largest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi River. The Lower Flathead River flows through the center of the reservation; and to the west are the Salish Mountains and prairie grasslands.  The reservation has been and remains an environmental stronghold of pristine forests, streams, rivers and grasslands in Western Montana. These lands comprise a portion of the 4% of Indigenous land in the United States that collectively containing more wildlands than all the National Parks and nature conservancy’s holdings in North America (Nabhan, 2000) while also exerting sovereignty over ~20% of our Nation’s fresh water resources (VanDervelder, 2009).

These vast and unspoiled lands on Indian Reservations provide a unique management challenge as our societal needs strain open space and untapped resources (UNEP, 2007). Roger Romulus Martella, Jr., former US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) General Counsel writes,

“…the nation's approximately three hundred Indian reservations serve as homes to mammoth oil refineries, strip mining and forestry operations, toxic waste dumps, hazardous waste recycling centers, and agricultural waste incinerators, among scores of other types of heavy industrial activities and factories. Both geologically and geographically, these operations have been particularly well suited to Indian reservations. Miners and refiners viewed tribal lands as attractive because many reservations contain vast natural resources-including large stores of petroleum and precious minerals-as well as residents desperate for money. Landfill and incinerator operators traditionally liked Indian country because of its frequent isolation and the sparse population of most reservations (Martella, 1994, pg. 1868)”

 In addition to these pressures placed on the landscapes and ecosystems of Indian Reservation by outside entities, Indigenous people also face daunting economic and educational challenges as most communities have been subject to substantial oppression and adversity in their histories. As a result, Indigenous people have been ill-prepared and under-trained in modern Western Science disciplines thereby depending primarily on non-Native Western science experts for technical and management needs of Native lands (Berardi et al., 2002; Nelson-Barber & Trumbull Estrin, 1995).  All the while, Indigenous societies and Native American tribes posses and utilize unique and  specific knowledge relating to the environment and local ecosystem (Fishman, 1991) and are actively engaged in environmental and biodiversity conservation on these lands through traditional means (Weber et al. 2000). Although most Indigenous knowledge systems, developed in the Americas for many thousands of years, and according to most Indigenous oral histories, since the time immemorial, are being under-utilized and marginalized by Western scientific educational systems.

During modern history, the epistemology and philosophy of Western science emerged from European countries approximately during the Age of Enlightenment. Western science has since evolved into a vector of assemblages to which the global community, either scientific or non-scientific, is required to compare to for a means of validity (Chambers and Gillepie, 2000). This system of knowledge verification has marginalized and dominated all other knowledge systems encountered by Western civilization through the process of colonialization. As Western civilizations migrated to the Americas, Western Science placed a foot hold where the guiding thought was that,

“…modernization assumes that the pattern that characterizes scientific/economic development in the West provide a model for other localities around the world to follow. Without considerable modification this assumption is effectively blind to both history and culture, and is premised on the notion that “pre-scientific” localities, today, start from a position similar to Europe’s before scientific take-off hundreds of years ago. Furthermore, the philosophy, religious beliefs, values, and institutions of traditional societies are considered probable obstacles, in effort, so much chaff to be blown away on the winds of scientific change.” (Chambers and Gillespie, 2000, pg 226)

This philosophy has limited scientific thought and discovery to a generalized Newtonian description of the world, an Indo-European worldview constructed from the apparent universalism and cultural imperialist manner found in the philosophy of Western epistemology. Specifically, the unwillingness of Western science to recognize Indigenous knowledge as valid knowledge, in comparison, has acted as an agent that, “… skews the historical record; undermines objectivity in Aboriginal, multicultural, and mainstream education; and seriously restricts approaches to some of our most vexations and debilitating environmental, science-technology, and socio-economic problems.” (Snivley & Corsiglia, 2001, pg 29).

How can we contribute to the development of a new tradition, built on remaining and revived traditions, to mend the institutions of higher education and better serve emerging Native scholars?